Recruiting tools to help you climb the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity™ curve
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As companies grow in sophistication, so does their hiring strategy and need for advanced recruiting tools. Greenhouse has created a Hiring Maturity curve to help companies understand where they currently stand and identify ways to get better. No matter where a company is on their Hiring Maturity journey, Greenhouse provides guidance on the processes and capabilities they need to develop to improve their overall hiring performance.
As customers make their way up the curve, out of the Chaotic and Inconsistent stages to Systematic and Strategic, they usually start asking more questions about how to build a proper TA tech stack to support their goals.
By adopting a core talent acquisition solution like Greenhouse, your TA tech stack can be assessed on a maturity curve from the basics to the most complex.
This article will guide you through developing your TA tech stack to match the needs and sophistication of your organization. You don’t necessarily need to add these recruiting tools in the order described, but we typically see companies start investing with the foundational resources in the early stages of their maturity and then build from there.
Foundational HR technologies
As you leave the world of spreadsheets behind and start to invest in hiring software like Greenhouse, it’s important to also think about all the other foundational tools, known as your TA tech stack. These are the solutions that will make your processes more efficient, save you time and get candidates through your pipeline quicker.
Here are the categories of foundational recruiting tools and solutions for you to explore as you begin to build out your HR tech stack.
Sourcing
There are many sourcing options to choose from, but as you are building out your process, it’s important to maximize the most valuable, organic sources. Within Greenhouse for example, users have the ability to enable LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and ZipRecruiter to start advertising their jobs immediately.
Over time, you’ll get better at assessing the quality of those individual sources and add more. In the beginning, these four sources are a great way to get in front of candidates outside of your network.
Moreover, many customers who have LinkedIn Recruiter licenses take advantage of the LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect (RSC) integration to seamlessly source and manage candidate information across Greenhouse and LinkedIn Recruiter.
Learn more about LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and ZipRecruiter.
Assessments
As you are improving your overall hiring experience, you want to make sure you are exploring recruiting tools that make evaluating candidates who make it past the application review stage more data-driven.
Within our user base, we see two types of testing platforms used most frequently:
Technical assessments – As you are trying to evaluate candidates for their technical skills, invest in technical assessment tools like HackerRank and Codility. These solutions have a variety of capabilities that allows you to test candidates live and store recordings for your engineering team to review.
Aptitude and skills assessments – Aptitude and skills assessment platforms can help reduce bias and add more rigor to your evaluation process. Products like Criteria Corp can be easily added as a stage in your recruiting funnel and you can apply tests designed by industry and academic experts.
Learn more about HackerRank, Codility and Criteria Corp.
Background checks
Background checks are another critical part of your recruiting process. They can be initiated at the offer stage via background check providers or prior to the offer. Leveraging a background check provider, especially one that integrates directly within your talent acquisition system, will allow you to extend offers more quickly and store all data and decision-making criteria on a candidate in one central place.
Greenhouse streamlines background checks by giving customers the ability to use a variety of solutions, which are already pre-integrated, saving recruiting teams valuable time while making sure new hires have gone through the appropriate and necessary screening processes.
Video interviewing
While once considered a more advanced tool in the TA tech stack, the current wave of businesses and individuals moving to a fully or mostly remote work environment now makes it critical to enable video interviewing.
There are two types of video interviews, live and asynchronous:
- Live video interviewing – Greenhouse’s Zoom integration enables you to embed live video calls without ever leaving the platform.
- Asynchronous – Companies like Spark Hire offer the choice of live screening right from your hiring dashboard or the ability for asynchronous interviews, which the hiring team can watch at any time. Asynchronous interviews create more flexibility and collaboration because schedules don’t hinder the process. This feature allows recruiters to view interviews on their own time, and it’s also helpful for candidates who can put their best foot forward with the additional flexibility.
Learn more about Zoom and Spark Hire.
eSignature
After all the work of finding the right candidate, you want to make sure your offer extension process is easy for your team and a seamless, positive experience for the candidate. Enabling an eSignature integration will save you time and effort, and makes it easy for candidates to say yes.
One of the most-used integrations on our platform, DocuSign is a great tool to seamlessly add to your hiring process.
Learn more about DocuSign.
Human resources information systems (HRIS)
Spreadsheets, numbers, dates and manual tracking – they’re enough to overwhelm anyone. At a foundational level, your organization may be using spreadsheets or an HRIS to manage non-recruiting functions like human resources, accounting, management and payroll.
As you hire candidates, it’s critical that you remove the burden from your recruiters to repeatedly enter data into your HR system of record. Leveraging a system that’s integrated with your TA software, like BambooHR, Namely, Workday or UltiPro, enables your team to focus more on creating a positive welcome experience than being bogged down in the administrative transfer of data.
Advanced HR technologies
Once you’ve confidently built your foundational tech stack, you’ll want to start exploring more advanced categories of partners to help you uplevel your hiring sophistication. These tools will help you collaborate better, further improve your candidate experience and find more efficiencies in your sourcing strategy.
Advanced sourcing
You’ve used the free job boards in Greenhouse, and now you want to find even better ways to engage passive candidates or folks in your database. You might be looking for a more advanced way to source. Here are a few suggestions:
- Email automation – Tools like Gem help you engage with candidates at the top of the funnel. You can set up automated sequences that keep your company top of mind for candidates and encourage them to apply. It’s even more intrinsic and useful if it also sits over your CRM features, like with the Greenhouse CRM, so you can better engage your candidate pools.
- AI sourcing – As you scale your recruiting efforts, you’ll want to try new methods of sourcing outside of LinkedIn. Tools like Hiretual have databases of candidates that you can sort through across 40+ platforms, and 750 million+ profiles that can be matched against your open job reqs. Another area to explore is candidature engagement bots like Wade & Wendy – tools that can help you engage with candidates at the top of the funnel and address knock-out questions before candidates even apply.
Learn more about Gem, Hiretual and Wade & Wendy.
Referrals
Add a boost to your referral process by proactively engaging your employees in identifying candidates. By now, you have a structure in place to reward employees who submit candidates, but you want to do more. Tools like Teamable and DRAFTED encourage social sharing of job opportunities within your employees’ communities to boost your efforts.
Productivity and collaboration tools
Connect Slack with your talent acquisition software to engage your entire organization in working where they already are. Alerts and notifications in a platform that your teams are already using enable you to extend the value of your hiring efforts deeper into the organization, especially as the world moves to more remote work.
Learn more about Slack.
Single sign-on
Single sign-on (SSO) enables employees to securely authenticate multiple applications and websites by logging in only once – with just one set of credentials (username and password). Your company might be using many different recruiting tools, so you want to make sure that you’re making it easier and more secure for employees to leverage their ATS. Well-known tools like Okta and OneLogin, among many others, are pre-integrated within Greenhouse, making it easier for IT departments to enable these integrations across an organization.
Texting
Texting is a growing way to engage with candidates. It’s not only more scalable and automated, but also more accessible for candidates, improving their overall experience.
An advanced tech stack will consider texting strategies and platforms like Grayscale to enable this communication on top of your central hiring system. Grayscale has a strong integration with Greenhouse that allows you to schedule text messages and add certain communication automations as candidates go through each stage of the journey. This allows you to stay in constant communication with candidates wherever they are.
Learn more about Grayscale.
Enhanced candidate surveys
Getting candidate feedback is key to improving the candidate experience. Luckily for Greenhouse customers, we’ve built a candidate survey tool that allows you to automate collecting feedback and benchmark your results against other Greenhouse customers.
If you are looking for more personalized results for your process, consider a candidate feedback solution like Starred or Trustcruit. These tools seamlessly integrate into your workflow so you can go deeper with candidate feedback, while still benchmarking against other organizations using Greenhouse.
Learn more about Starred or Trustcruit.
Scheduling
Scheduling initial screenings can be incredibly time-consuming for recruiting coordinators. One way to alleviate this burden is to invest in a self-service scheduling tool. Products like Calendly are helpful as part of your tech stack and their self-service tool is free. If you use Greenhouse, it’s already integrated.
If you have a particularly complex scheduling process like a round robin or campus events, you might consider a more advanced scheduling tool like Interview Schedule or Goodtime. Meant to save time as you schedule, these tools help you quickly identify the availability of both candidates and interviewers.
Learn more about Calendly, Interview Schedule or Goodtime.
Advanced reports
Analytics dashboards help improve reporting capabilities and connect that data more seamlessly to the other sources of data that drive your business. Tools like Visier integrate with your finance technology, HR platforms and Greenhouse so you can build custom reports and data visualizations for key stakeholders and people leaders. Collecting data sets across different systems can be overwhelming – these tools simplify the process of building the relevant reports your team needs to make better decisions.
Learn more about Visier
Complex TA technologies
More complex integration partners are generally the ones that have complicated workflows and may require a bit of customization or additional expertise to fit your needs.
These require more integration maintenance and people to optimize your process, which will help ensure you get the best ROI out of these tools.
Marketing automation
The right automation technology allows you to improve your career site, build complex marketing campaigns with your candidates and personalize the candidate experience at scale. Sitting on top of Greenhouse Recruiting and our CRM, these platforms can help you engage candidates more deeply through marketing drip campaigns, custom landing pages, automated messages and more.
Because of their robust functionality, these recruiting tools are some of the most expansive integrations on our platform, covering almost every stage of the hiring process. Leveraging these tools takes marketing skills, and will require deep understanding of the integrations themselves.
Solutions like Eightfold and Beamery are the most commonly used in complex organizations.
Performance advertising
More sophisticated organizations are going beyond traditional job buying products (for example, single job postings) and starting to explore performance advertising to push their jobs. Like the ones marketers use, there are plenty of tools to buy ads programmatically to make the most of every dollar you spend.
Companies like Recruitics and Appcast have both the technology and services to help you buy programmatically across job sites. They are often meant for staffing agencies, given the scale of their efforts and the expertise required, but they do work across corporate and can be a powerful tool in your recruiting tech stack.
Learn more about Recruitics and Appcast.
Analytics platforms
There are a host of non-integrated analytics platforms like Tableau, PowerBI and Looker that can be leveraged using our Greenhouse BI Connector.
The BI Connector is designed for companies with robust analytics and business intelligence requirements who prefer a more flexible, hands-on approach to analyzing their data. It’s best suited for companies with a business intelligence analyst and a great way to maximize the tools already being used across your business.
Learn more about the BI Connector.
As your hiring matures, so should the recruiting tools your team uses
Everyone's tech stack can and should be built differently, which is why this is not intended to prescribe an order for you to build your process. These tools can enhance your recruiting process as long as they are used correctly and engaged strategically when you are ready to take advantage of them. Keep that in mind – along with your company’s specific goals – as you discover new tools to use on top of your hiring software.
Table of contents
Foundational
Advanced
Productivity and collaboration tools
Advanced reports
Complex
Foundational HR technologies
As you leave the world of spreadsheets behind and start to invest in hiring software like Greenhouse, it’s important to also think about all the other foundational tools, known as your TA tech stack. These are the solutions that will make your processes more efficient, save you time and get candidates through your pipeline quicker.
Here are the categories of foundational recruiting tools and solutions for you to explore as you begin to build out your HR tech stack.
Sourcing
There are many sourcing options to choose from, but as you are building out your process, it’s important to maximize the most valuable, organic sources. Within Greenhouse for example, users have the ability to enable LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and ZipRecruiter to start advertising their jobs immediately.
Over time, you’ll get better at assessing the quality of those individual sources and add more. In the beginning, these four sources are a great way to get in front of candidates outside of your network.
Moreover, many customers who have LinkedIn Recruiter licenses take advantage of the LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect (RSC) integration to seamlessly source and manage candidate information across Greenhouse and LinkedIn Recruiter.
Learn more about LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and ZipRecruiter.
Assessments
As you are improving your overall hiring experience, you want to make sure you are exploring recruiting tools that make evaluating candidates who make it past the application review stage more data-driven.
Within our user base, we see two types of testing platforms used most frequently:
Technical assessments – As you are trying to evaluate candidates for their technical skills, invest in technical assessment tools like HackerRank and Codility. These solutions have a variety of capabilities that allows you to test candidates live and store recordings for your engineering team to review.
Aptitude and skills assessments – Aptitude and skills assessment platforms can help reduce bias and add more rigor to your evaluation process. Products like Criteria Corp can be easily added as a stage in your recruiting funnel and you can apply tests designed by industry and academic experts.
Learn more about HackerRank, Codility and Criteria Corp.
Background checks
Background checks are another critical part of your recruiting process. They can be initiated at the offer stage via background check providers or prior to the offer. Leveraging a background check provider, especially one that integrates directly within your talent acquisition system, will allow you to extend offers more quickly and store all data and decision-making criteria on a candidate in one central place.
Greenhouse streamlines background checks by giving customers the ability to use a variety of solutions, which are already pre-integrated, saving recruiting teams valuable time while making sure new hires have gone through the appropriate and necessary screening processes.
Video interviewing
While once considered a more advanced tool in the TA tech stack, the current wave of businesses and individuals moving to a fully or mostly remote work environment now makes it critical to enable video interviewing.
There are two types of video interviews, live and asynchronous:
- Live video interviewing – Greenhouse’s Zoom integration enables you to embed live video calls without ever leaving the platform.
- Asynchronous – Companies like Spark Hire offer the choice of live screening right from your hiring dashboard or the ability for asynchronous interviews, which the hiring team can watch at any time. Asynchronous interviews create more flexibility and collaboration because schedules don’t hinder the process. This feature allows recruiters to view interviews on their own time, and it’s also helpful for candidates who can put their best foot forward with the additional flexibility.
Learn more about Zoom and Spark Hire.
eSignature
After all the work of finding the right candidate, you want to make sure your offer extension process is easy for your team and a seamless, positive experience for the candidate. Enabling an eSignature integration will save you time and effort, and makes it easy for candidates to say yes.
One of the most-used integrations on our platform, DocuSign is a great tool to seamlessly add to your hiring process.
Learn more about DocuSign.
Human resources information systems (HRIS)
Spreadsheets, numbers, dates and manual tracking – they’re enough to overwhelm anyone. At a foundational level, your organization may be using spreadsheets or an HRIS to manage non-recruiting functions like human resources, accounting, management and payroll.
As you hire candidates, it’s critical that you remove the burden from your recruiters to repeatedly enter data into your HR system of record. Leveraging a system that’s integrated with your TA software, like BambooHR, Namely, Workday or UltiPro, enables your team to focus more on creating a positive welcome experience than being bogged down in the administrative transfer of data.
Advanced HR technologies
Once you’ve confidently built your foundational tech stack, you’ll want to start exploring more advanced categories of partners to help you uplevel your hiring sophistication. These tools will help you collaborate better, further improve your candidate experience and find more efficiencies in your sourcing strategy.
Advanced sourcing
You’ve used the free job boards in Greenhouse, and now you want to find even better ways to engage passive candidates or folks in your database. You might be looking for a more advanced way to source. Here are a few suggestions:
- Email automation – Tools like Gem help you engage with candidates at the top of the funnel. You can set up automated sequences that keep your company top of mind for candidates and encourage them to apply. It’s even more intrinsic and useful if it also sits over your CRM features, like with the Greenhouse CRM, so you can better engage your candidate pools.
- AI sourcing – As you scale your recruiting efforts, you’ll want to try new methods of sourcing outside of LinkedIn. Tools like Hiretual have databases of candidates that you can sort through across 40+ platforms, and 750 million+ profiles that can be matched against your open job reqs. Another area to explore is candidature engagement bots like Wade & Wendy – tools that can help you engage with candidates at the top of the funnel and address knock-out questions before candidates even apply.
Learn more about Gem, Hiretual and Wade & Wendy.
Referrals
Add a boost to your referral process by proactively engaging your employees in identifying candidates. By now, you have a structure in place to reward employees who submit candidates, but you want to do more. Tools like Teamable and DRAFTED encourage social sharing of job opportunities within your employees’ communities to boost your efforts.
Productivity and collaboration tools
Connect Slack with your talent acquisition software to engage your entire organization in working where they already are. Alerts and notifications in a platform that your teams are already using enable you to extend the value of your hiring efforts deeper into the organization, especially as the world moves to more remote work.
Learn more about Slack.
Single sign-on
Single sign-on (SSO) enables employees to securely authenticate multiple applications and websites by logging in only once – with just one set of credentials (username and password). Your company might be using many different recruiting tools, so you want to make sure that you’re making it easier and more secure for employees to leverage their ATS. Well-known tools like Okta and OneLogin, among many others, are pre-integrated within Greenhouse, making it easier for IT departments to enable these integrations across an organization.
Texting
Texting is a growing way to engage with candidates. It’s not only more scalable and automated, but also more accessible for candidates, improving their overall experience.
An advanced tech stack will consider texting strategies and platforms like Grayscale to enable this communication on top of your central hiring system. Grayscale has a strong integration with Greenhouse that allows you to schedule text messages and add certain communication automations as candidates go through each stage of the journey. This allows you to stay in constant communication with candidates wherever they are.
Learn more about Grayscale.
Enhanced candidate surveys
Getting candidate feedback is key to improving the candidate experience. Luckily for Greenhouse customers, we’ve built a candidate survey tool that allows you to automate collecting feedback and benchmark your results against other Greenhouse customers.
If you are looking for more personalized results for your process, consider a candidate feedback solution like Starred or Trustcruit. These tools seamlessly integrate into your workflow so you can go deeper with candidate feedback, while still benchmarking against other organizations using Greenhouse.
Learn more about Starred or Trustcruit.
Scheduling
Scheduling initial screenings can be incredibly time-consuming for recruiting coordinators. One way to alleviate this burden is to invest in a self-service scheduling tool. Products like Calendly are helpful as part of your tech stack and their self-service tool is free. If you use Greenhouse, it’s already integrated.
If you have a particularly complex scheduling process like a round robin or campus events, you might consider a more advanced scheduling tool like Interview Schedule or Goodtime. Meant to save time as you schedule, these tools help you quickly identify the availability of both candidates and interviewers.
Learn more about Calendly, Interview Schedule or Goodtime.
Advanced reports
Analytics dashboards help improve reporting capabilities and connect that data more seamlessly to the other sources of data that drive your business. Tools like Visier integrate with your finance technology, HR platforms and Greenhouse so you can build custom reports and data visualizations for key stakeholders and people leaders. Collecting data sets across different systems can be overwhelming – these tools simplify the process of building the relevant reports your team needs to make better decisions.
Learn more about Visier
Complex TA technologies
More complex integration partners are generally the ones that have complicated workflows and may require a bit of customization or additional expertise to fit your needs.
These require more integration maintenance and people to optimize your process, which will help ensure you get the best ROI out of these tools.
Marketing automation
The right automation technology allows you to improve your career site, build complex marketing campaigns with your candidates and personalize the candidate experience at scale. Sitting on top of Greenhouse Recruiting and our CRM, these platforms can help you engage candidates more deeply through marketing drip campaigns, custom landing pages, automated messages and more.
Because of their robust functionality, these recruiting tools are some of the most expansive integrations on our platform, covering almost every stage of the hiring process. Leveraging these tools takes marketing skills, and will require deep understanding of the integrations themselves.
Solutions like Eightfold and Beamery are the most commonly used in complex organizations.
Performance advertising
More sophisticated organizations are going beyond traditional job buying products (for example, single job postings) and starting to explore performance advertising to push their jobs. Like the ones marketers use, there are plenty of tools to buy ads programmatically to make the most of every dollar you spend.
Companies like Recruitics and Appcast have both the technology and services to help you buy programmatically across job sites. They are often meant for staffing agencies, given the scale of their efforts and the expertise required, but they do work across corporate and can be a powerful tool in your recruiting tech stack.
Learn more about Recruitics and Appcast.
Analytics platforms
There are a host of non-integrated analytics platforms like Tableau, PowerBI and Looker that can be leveraged using our Greenhouse BI Connector.
The BI Connector is designed for companies with robust analytics and business intelligence requirements who prefer a more flexible, hands-on approach to analyzing their data. It’s best suited for companies with a business intelligence analyst and a great way to maximize the tools already being used across your business.
Learn more about the BI Connector.
As your hiring matures, so should the recruiting tools your team uses
Everyone's tech stack can and should be built differently, which is why this is not intended to prescribe an order for you to build your process. These tools can enhance your recruiting process as long as they are used correctly and engaged strategically when you are ready to take advantage of them. Keep that in mind – along with your company’s specific goals – as you discover new tools to use on top of your hiring software.
Garret Starr
is the Director of Partnerships at Greenhouse, where he oversees technology and service partners in the Greenhouse ecosystem. For the past three years, Garret has focused on enabling customers to make the most of Greenhouse's expansive and differentiated group of technology partners and service providers. Garret is a husband to his smarter wife, Andi and a father to his dog son, Graham.